


the horror, the horror

by slire



Series: The Shadow Biosphere [4]
Category: Mushishi
Genre: Deconstruction, Gen, Historical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-25
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-04-10 21:29:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4408394
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slire/pseuds/slire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p></p><blockquote>
  <p>"What are the worst cases you've ever had?"</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	the horror, the horror

Ginko seeks the shadows. He settles under a lone tree on a hill, breathing hard, wiping sweat from his forehead. Mouth is dry and sponged by heat, tongue a thick fuzzy clogging weight in his mouth, breath  _stinks_ ; a combo of dug-up roots and spoiled fruit. Trusting the villagers he spoke with to keep their word, he won't starve just yet (even if Hunger yowls angrily inside him and tears him apart in search of nourishment like a baby—but again, not yet). In the worst case he'll have to sell some belongings.  He can deal with the hunger. It's the emotions the need brings he's unnerved by. Frustration. Desperation. And worst of all, especially in his line of work, pessimism. 

Quickly enough, a girl from the village comes running, carrying a basket. Relief washes over him like cool water. He halts mid-exhale. She does not wear ragged robes or downcast eyes. Though he cares little for meekness in women (because more often than not meekness will not save you), he saw the peasants and knows that she is not one of them. Judging by her attire and fat cheeks, a noble. The daughter of someone important. The mushi of the morning dance around her, wiggling and writhing and metamorphosing, but she doesn't have the sight. "You're the mushishi, right?" she asks, panting more than he did, hands on her knees.

 Ginko nods, once. The girl seems to expect that he'll speak, but he doesn't. She lifts the basket, questionably. His mouth falls open without his consent and his vulnerability makes the little piggie squeal.  _'No,'_  he corrects himself, one hand on his stomach,  _'let us not let basic needs twist my mind and make me see demons in children.'_

"I'm Yoshiko. Daughter of Kojima Juubei-hachiro." A child of a samurai clan, then. Ginko waits, stoic. He lets his eye slide east, and sees the farmers in the rice fields watching them, pretending to be working. Stationed closer, there are guards. Samurai. The girl continues, "Can't you talk?"

"I'm very hungry," he says. 

She glares at him—it lasts a minute. It's as if she attempts to scrutiny some great truth from him. "Aren't you gonna offer something in return for my gifts?"

"I'm afraid I don't have much to offer a child," Ginko says honestly.

"Not a child," she huffs, but her eyes suddenly gets a glittering quality, a mix of sweet and scary. "And yes, you do.  _Stories_. So, mushishi..." the glittering increases, "What are the worst cases you've ever had?"

Memories erupt like pus from a wound, and he grimaces. They always want stories. Preferably the worst ones. He will never get that thirst. When he said he didn't have much to offer a child... well, he was right. It is only his black hole belly that makes him relent. "I cannot tell you anything on an empty stomach." 

"My father told me to bargain. I want twelve stories."

Twelve? That'd take forever. Frankly he's exhausted, and the heel of his left foot is acting up. He'll have to rub it with a salve, wrap it in bandages and let it soak for the night, lest the skin will loosen. It is the image of the loose skin that triggers an idea. He's familiar with numerous believes—dissecting his way through the culture with the mind of a surgeon—and Bushidō / 'the way of the samurai' are one of them. There are values in every system based on faith (it be social, political or religious) and the samurai life is no exception. He must approach her with themes she knows if he wishes to eat... and keep his bowels intact. Plus, he might even  _get to her_. He watches the girl through half-lidded eyes, "I'll give you seven distinct stories. Ah," he gracefully interrupts when her tiny mouth opens to protest, "there will also be a catch. A riddle, if you prefer. A mystery for  **you**  to solve. All of these stories are connected, somehow, and it is your job to figure out how. So you will listen very closely, while I tell," he leans forward, knows he has her on his hook and pulls, "and eat."

Wordless, she shoves the basket forward. 

Ginko rummages around in its content. His mouth waters. A herbal capriccio rises towards his face; umeboshi (pickled plum), shiso (basil), tade (water pepper) and hakobe (chickweed); ginger, pepper, wasabi and several other fragrant food he doesn't recognize; a series of daring modulation through the spice keys into ambergris. All sorts of cakes and fruits and a bowl of hot soup reside in the basket. Is this a lesson in bargaining, from father to daughter? A lesson that results in food wasted on him instead of the farmers? But Ginko knows his hunger is stronger than his guilt. He stuffs his face. When his stomach finally stops screaming and destroying itself like an organism looking for something inside itself and failing, he says, thinking he's calm, "Concerning the mushi, I want you to—"

"I can't see mushi, so don't bother describing them. I don't care about them. Disgusting creatures."

_Squelch_. 

Ah. He seems to have burst the plum in his palm. No matter. The girl frowns at him. Ginko sucks the juice from his fingers one by one, and begins to tell the tales. 

.

.

**I: Gi  
** Once, a father came home with glossy dead-certain eyes and a face smeared in crusted, brown liquid. He would not tell where he'd been. From then on, he'd become cynical. He used the word "no" as a mantra, like an animal noise. The father was a baker (though the rumours said he'd once been something else) and the mother had died in childbirth the year before, leaving him alone to feed three small children. One day a villainous lord visited the bakery. The father, still with his glossy dead-certain eyes refused the lord immediately. The lord raised his sword. "If you do not apologize and serve me, I will kill your children one by one." The father refused. The lord killed the first child, then the second one. He said would spare his last and youngest child if the father would only apologize. But the father still had his glossy dead-certain eyes.

**II: Rei  
** The lord had grown overweight in his later years, fat belly bulging, skin flabby and grey. He was—or had been, perhaps?—the agricultural village's strongest warrior and had thus inherited the high position as its protector and subsequent ruler. They showered him with gifts, in particular food. In later years, only his wife was allowed to visit his throneroom. And then along came a war. The villagers sent the enemy's strongest warrior up into the lavish suite where the lord resided. The warrior returned with a story: upon cutting through the abundance of gifts (rotten food, bug-eaten fabric, more flies than he had ever seen), he had found the protector  _grown into_  the throne, skin having locked itself around the stone like vine, stretched horribly. It was uncertain when—or if—he'd died, but the warrior had fled before checking. The cruel thing was that he found the lord's wife, undeniably dead, curled at his feet as if weeping. 

**III: Yu  
** The woman moved there one winter. At odd hours, they'd see her go down in the cellar. The fires would be lit and she'd walk through her thin-walled house like a ghost. She kept something down there, and her neighbors all knew and talked, and talked, and talked. She had arrived at night, taken the old house (supposedly haunted) and brought something—or someone—with her. They decided it was a someone when it started screaming, a summer's night, foreign words, another tongue. The glimpses caught of it were gruesome; something decidedly person-shaped, child-sized, with what could've been a skin disease. But they were good neighbors, and did not yet intervine, even if they thought they should: because that was heroic courage, after all, intelligent and strong. It was children who sought her out. They crawled into her cellar one morning. The children gazed into the window... A monster gazed back. The girl, mad with grief, had fought the neighbors when they removed the monster. First when the neighbors buried it did it receive peace, an unpleasant burial, alive as it was, but at least it stopped screaming. Finally would the mother (as they discovered) receive peace.

**IV: Meiyo  
** He had been guarding his boss' wife for the longest of time, the family's most trust warrior. He did not speak much, and he never crossed any boundaries, allowed to be around the children and the lady as they took their baths in the hot springs. Until one day he did not see an assassin and the beautiful wife had her beautiful throat slit. In distress, the guard disemboweled himself. Perhaps he was convinced there was something inside, a darkness that'd slide out along with his intestines.  **  
**

**V: Jin  
** The change appeared when the wife was 22. An autumn-child, fair and pale, she was prone to moods, kept subsided by her strict—but respected—husband, a blacksmith. All her children were renowned for their well behaviour and oddly thin skin. Each had scratches, scars and bruises from what they described as nothing. The wife was expecting her fifth child, pregnancy worsening her hysteria, and one day the villagers found her pale and shaking in the woods. Something had infected the baby: her stomach was full of bruises. On the seventh month, she miscarried. The doctors there described what came out as a lumpy pool of blood.   

**VI: Makoto  
** A seamstress had heard the myth of the fabric-making worms in the mountain. As a child, she made a promise with another boy to visit it. It was harsh, and ragged, and a foggy temperate continually ruled, accompanied by stories of death and torment and lovers torn apart. The boy died of some unmentionable disease. The seamstress decided on finishing their promise anyway. The seamstress went up the mountain, leaving infant twins and a brother behind. She tied one end of the rope around her and the other to the door of her house before wandering off into the fog. After two days, her brother dragged back the rope, torn off at the end. Nobody ever saw her since.

**VII: Chu  
** It was the landscape that shifted. There was no sudden, dramatic change but she knew, oh, she knew. Objects shifted, vanished or got thrown in the thrash. Their little house's atmosphere darkened. No birdsong outside, or was that their imagination? She was sick and wanted to die. He remained fiercely loyal through it all. He prized loyalty above all else; loyalty to her. Yet she forgot aspects of his life, and of their shared life, as she withered. One day he came home and found her on the floor, rolling around, drooling all over herself, having attempted to kill herself using poison. "I am loyal," he said, "I will protect your life, like a good warrior." _I don't want you too_ , she'd reply, but the disease (or was it the poison?) had already taken her voice.

.

.

The girl applauds when it is clear he will not talk more. Luckily, she does not scream "again!" She is satisfied—and slightly scared. Which is the exact and proper way to react to stories, in Ginko's opinion, in particular to  _his_ stories. She thanks him, satisfied, and is about to run down the hill to her bodyguards when she remembers and whirls around. "What was the catch?"

Ginko looks at her. A moment passes.

"None of these tales, in any shape or form, involved mushi."

**Author's Note:**

> tldr: explores mental illness, abuse and handicaps between the Edo and Meiji periods, which Ginko doubtlessly has come across because of people thinking it was mushi.


End file.
